NB: for the purposes of this article, we have gone with the same definition of a volley as suggested in this piece: namely that a volley is only a volley when it does not touch the floor between the previous player touching the ball and the ball being struck at goal (it does not matter how many touches the striker has). No, we are not naïve enough to expect all comments to adhere to this definition.

Also, this list does not purport to be definitive. We are aware that Marco van Basten's volley in the European Championship final of 1988 is probably among the top six goals of all time, never mind the top six volleys, but we decided to do something else. We hope this does not spoil your day.

Many descriptions of sporting greatness justifiably refer to a subject who has been able to bend a seismic contest to his will, but even rarer is the man who can bend it to his skill. There has been no more significant football example than Zinedine Zidane's volley in the European Cup final of 2002, the greatest winning goal in history*.

Never mind two goals in a World Cup final and a chestbutt that almost made violence cool; this was absolutely Zizou's zenith. In some respects, the best part is not the whirling volley but the furious concentration as the ball drops from the heavens. Zidane stares at the ball like a stalker before contorting his body into a grotesque and ugly position - but one that enabled him to produce a moment of unforgettable beauty.

There are flying volleys. There are lobs. There are shots with the outside of the foot. There are flying volleyed lobs. There are flying volleys with the outside of the foot. There are lobs with the outside of the foot. And then there's this sinew-straining, foot-tensing masterpiece.

(There is also an amusingly Verónish aspect to it. Not even Enoch Powell was as loath to embrace the left as the entirely right-footed Verón, who simply refuses to use his left foot in case the wind changes.)

The volley is widely perceived as the hardest skill in football, but the flip side of that difficulty is that it is the perfect tool with which to demonstrate your superiority, as Eric Cantona showed at Selhurst Park in 1994. The backstory is important here: Cantona should have been sent off in the previous round, at Norwich, and in the seemingly interminable build-up to this match (the FA Cup was big news in those days), Wimbledon promised to ruffle his feathers, get in his face, and other popular cliches. Early on Vinnie Jones piled in with a laughable and predictable reducer; Cantona simply looked Jones up and down with the sort of magisterial contempt that only he could muster, and then, just before half-time, showed how you really hurt someone on a football field.

Gary Elkins made his only contribution to football history by heading Denis Irwin's long cross to the edge of the box, whereupon Cantona killed the ball with a velvety touch and then leathered it beyond Hans Segers. It was a perfectly unanswerable piece of skill that broke Wimbledon, who had been in the game until then, completely. There is some rather absurd revisionism going round about Cantona's contribution to the Premier League. He might not have been the greatest overseas player in English football history - the quality of the game in this country has increased so much in the last 15 years - but nobody has been so superior to his peers. And nobody knew how to demonstrate that superiority in such a regal manner. This was not a footballer; this was Cantona.

One of football's more cringeworthy experiences occurs when a player - someone like Gary Neville or, well, Gary Neville - lines up a long-range shot that everyone else in the entire world knows is going miles over the bar. They rumble towards the ball, convinced that they are about to define their careers; we recoil behind the sofa. It's like seeing your mate try to pull someone palpably out of their league. The same feeling prevailed when Darío Rodríguez galumphed towards the ball, almost in slow motion, during the World Cup match between Denmark and Uruguay in 2002.

The set-up had been so perfect, with the ball not touching the floor after a corner had been headed clear then controlled, controlled again and flipped sideways by Pablo Garcia, that you just knew Rodríguez was about to endanger low-flying aircraft. Except he didn't. He slashed across the ball immaculately to send it spinning away from Thomas Sorensen and into the corner. The skill from Garcia made the goal even more special - tic, tic, tic, BOOM - and Rodríguez set off with the entirely warranted celebration of a man who had indeed defined his career. (And equalised for his country in a vital World Cup game but, well, we're all human.)

To misquote Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: a volley is not 'Nam; there are rules. And Rule No1 is that you do not hit a volley while leaning back. That, among other things, makes Hans Krankl's wundergoal in the 1978 World Cup so special. When he controlled the ball he was facing his own goal, but managed to adjust quickly to manufacture the shot and then control it perfectly with the instep. Given the angle of his body, which was going backwards like a falling oak, it's a miracle that he kept the ball in the stadium, never mind on target. The quickness of his movements, both physically and mentally, is also startling: there is a lovely moment in the split-second between the first and second touches when we realise what he has done, and is about to do: snap, Krankl, pop. Or, as the peerless Barry Davies put it, "Oh Krankl! Ohhh Kraaankl!"